Six days of the Irish Republic Part 13

Those who think they can explain away the Sinn Fein rising of 1916 by the factor of German gold make much the same mistake as those who were so anxious to explain away the Home Rule movement by American dollars.

The fact of the matter is, great movements and national uprisings should not be explained away: they should be, on the contrary, amplified, emphasized, and deeply studied.

I remember on one occasion the late W. T. Stead, when he was helping me with the biography of my uncle, Mr. John Redmond, emphasizing upon me the tremendous importance of the study of Irish problems to an Empire like ours, where nearly every one of its component nations is a repet.i.tion of Ireland.

"We have made every mistake we could possibly make as a ruling race in our government of you Irish," he said to me, "and we cannot, as we love and wish to keep our Empire, continue to perpetuate them.

"We can keep Ireland down if we like by force of arms, but we shall never be able to keep our Empire by the same means, and that is why it is so important that with such an object-lesson at our very doors we should be ever prepared to study how conquered or incorporated nations look upon our rule.

"That rule may be a protection, and it should be, but our stupidity can make it a yoke; yet of this we can be certain, that what fails to win friendship and respect in Ireland will fail to win security for our Empire when we employ those methods on nations who have it in their power to say us nay."

In other words, as long as the suppression has only been a military suppression it has been no suppression at all; any more than a delirious patient who is drugged or held down by force by a couple of hospital porters is cured by that expedient.

Moreover, all such expedients are necessarily merely temporary, and what we want to get at are the root causes of the complaint.

We must therefore fully diagnose those grievances of which the rebellion was only the outward symptom, and against which the Republic was more, after all, a symbolic protest than anything else; it was no more really intended to establish a Celtic Commonwealth than Sir Edward Carson's army was to change a Province into a Kingdom. Both were _facons de parler_, and the word "provisional" saved them from ridicule they would otherwise have deserved.

I remember speaking to a prominent Sinn Feiner only a couple of days before the revolt with a view to writing an article on the Volunteers, and this is what he said:--

"It would be very difficult for anyone to write anything just at present, for things are trembling in the balance. There is a most tremendous battle going on at the present moment at the Castle, we understand, between General Friend and Augustine Birrell--in other words, between the military and the civil authorities--and everything depends upon that issue.

"They want to take away our arms, for example, and not those of Redmond or Carson, and the latter will stand by and see it done without a word; but we know that's only the thin end of the wedge of the complete subjugation of Ireland to the soldier, as in the days of Cromwell, and even if we stand alone we will stop that.

"They don't half of them know a tenth of our power; even people in Ireland don't realize it. We are completely organized and perfectly equipped, far better even than the Ulster Volunteers are, and they will find out their mistake when they try.

"They've made two attempts already, in a hole-and-corner sort of way, at the Gaelic Press and at Liberty Hall, and the police found themselves looking into the barrels of revolvers each time. Well, all I can say is, when the day comes and they determine to strike--and we'll get wind of it--you may depend upon it the whole world will get a surprise; it will be like nothing else in Irish history for seven hundred years.

"We have our supplies at regular intervals, and our local commanders, with each province fully organized under them, and a complete system of code messages which never go through the post, but are distributed by means of secret dispatch-riders, and if the signal went forth to-night, to-morrow morning the whole of Ireland would be up in arms."

All of which, I need hardly say, I took--as everyone in my place would have taken it--_c.u.m grano salis_, but it all came back to me the moment I heard the first shot. Especially did it flash across my mind when, bringing back to Dun's Hospital a dead Sinn Feiner, the famous doc.u.ment fell out of his pocket, which is strikingly similar in thought to my friend's prognostications.

According to Alderman Kelly, speaking on the Thursday before the outbreak in the Dublin Corporation, some such order had been "recently addressed to and was on the files of Dublin Castle," according to which the arrest of all the leaders of the Irish Volunteers, together with the members of the Sinn Fein Council, the Executive Committee of the National (Redmondite) Volunteers, and the Executive Committee of the Gaelic League, had been sanctioned.

Probably, however, the best diagnosis of the situation immediately preceding the outbreak was the letter published by the _New Statesman_ of May 6th, that had been written as early as April 7th, and which, coming from the most eminent victim of the danger so clearly foreseen by him, must have special force at the present moment.

It was from no less than F. Sheehy Skeffington.

"SIR,--The situation in Ireland is extremely grave. Thanks to the silence of the daily Press, the military authorities are pursuing their Prussian plans in Ireland un.o.bserved by the British public; and, when the explosion which they have provoked occurs, they will endeavour to delude the British public as to where the responsibility lies. I write in the hope that, despite war-fever, there may be enough sanity and common sense left to restrain the militarists while there is yet time.

"I will not take up your s.p.a.ce by recounting the events that have led up to the present situation--the two years' immunity accorded to Sir Edward Carson's Volunteers in their defiant illegalities, the systematic persecution of the Irish Volunteers _from the moment of their formation_ (_nine months before the war_), the militarist provocations, raids on printing offices, arbitrary deportations, and savage sentences which have punctuated Mr. Redmond's recruiting appeals for the past eighteen months. As a result of this recent series of events, Irish Nationalist and Labour opinion is now in a state of extreme exasperation. Recruiting for the British Army is dead; recruiting for the Irish Volunteers has, for the moment, almost reached the mark of one thousand per week--which is Lord Wimborne's demand for the British Army. A special stimulus has been given to the Irish Volunteer movement by the arrest and threatened forcible deportation (at the moment of writing it is still uncertain whether the threat will be carried out) of two of its most active organizers.

"There are two distinct danger-points in the position. In the first place, the Irish Volunteers are prepared, if any attempt is made forcibly to disarm them, to resist, and to defend their rifles with their lives. In the second place, the Irish Citizen Army (the Labour Volunteers) are prepared to offer similar resistance, not only to disarmament, but to any attack upon the Press which turns out the _Workers' Republic_--successor to the suppressed _Irish Worker_--which is printed in Liberty Hall.

"There is no bluff in either case. That was shown (1) in Tullamore on March 20th, when an attempt at disarming the small local corps of Irish Volunteers was met with revolver shots and a policeman was wounded--fortunately not seriously; (2) in Dublin, on March 24th and following days, when, at the rumour of an intended raid on the _Workers'

Republic_, the Irish Citizen Army stood guard night and day in Liberty Hall--many of them having thrown up their jobs to answer promptly the mobilization order--armed and prepared to sell their lives dearly. The British military authorities in Ireland know perfectly well that the members of both these organizations are earnest, determined men. If, knowing this, General Friend and his subordinate militarists proceed either to disarm the Volunteers or to raid the Labour Press, it can only be because they _want_ bloodshed--because they want to provoke another '98, and to get an excuse for a machine-gun ma.s.sacre.

"Irish pacifists who have watched the situation closely are convinced that this is precisely what the militarists do want. The younger English officers in Dublin make no secret of their eagerness 'to have a whack at the Sinn Feiners'; they would much rather fight them than the Germans.[3] They are spurred on by the Carson-Northcliffe conscriptionist gang in London. On April 5th the _Morning Post_ vehemently demanded the suppression of the _Workers' Republic_; on April 6th a question was put down in the House of Commons urging Mr. Birrell to disarm the Irish Volunteers. These gentry know well the precise points where a pogrom can most easily be started.

"Twice already General Friend has been on the point of setting Ireland in a blaze--once last November, when he had a warrant made out for the arrest of Bishop O'Dwyer, of Limerick; once on March 25th, when he had a detachment of soldiers with machine guns in readiness to raid Liberty Hall. In both cases Mr. Birrell intervened in the nick of time, and decisively vetoed the militarist plans. But some day Mr. Birrell may be overborne or may intervene too late. Then, once bloodshed is started in Ireland, who can say where or how it will end?

"In the midst of world-wide carnage, bloodshed in our little island may seem a trivial thing. The wiping out of all the Irish Nationalist and Labour Volunteers would hardly involve as much slaughter as the single battle of Loos. Doubtless that is the military calculation--that their crime may be overlooked in a world of criminals. Accordingly, the nearer peace comes, the more eager will they be to force a conflict before their chance vanishes. Is there in Great Britain enough real sympathy with Small Nationalities, enough real hatred of militarism, to frustrate this Pogrom Plot of British Militarist Junkerdom?

"Yours, etc., "F. SHEEHY SKEFFINGTON."

Personally, I think I can diagnose the rebellion into ten perfectly distinct factors, but by far the least of them all is Germany. Germany was the personal note which Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt brought in, and which left it with his failure. It was accidental and extraneous both to the Sinn Fein Volunteers and the Citizen Army, though both were willing to make use of it.

Anyone who has taken the trouble to peruse the literature which fed the movement will recognize these diverse elements under various forms which appear in different places, but they are perfectly distinct.

The most immediate cause was the undoubted intention of the authorities to disarm them--a threat which had been overhanging them for some time, and which, in view of the well-known leniency of the Government with regard both to Sir Edward Carson and John Redmond in the same matter, struck them as particularly unjust, the more so perhaps because both Sinn Feiners and Larkinites thought that the Nationalists and the Orangemen would be only too glad to combine with the Government against them if need be.

Thus, if we take the issue of the _Workers' Republic_ of April 22, 1916, we find an account, quoted from the _Liverpool Courier_, of how Connolly, the Commandant of the Citizens' Army, stopped the police raid, in search of papers, on the shop of the Workers' Co-operative Society at 31, Eden Quay, having been informed of their intention.

"Connolly," says the account, "arrived on the scene just as one of the police got in behind the counter. Inquiring if the police had any search warrant, they answered that they had not. On hearing this, Mr. Connolly, turning to the policeman behind the counter as he had lifted up a bundle of papers, covered him with an automatic pistol, and quietly said: 'Then drop those papers, or I'll drop you.' He dropped the papers.

Then he was ordered out from behind the counter, and he cleared. His fellow-burglar tried to be insolent, and was quickly told that as they had no search warrant they were doing an illegal act, and the first one who ventured to touch a paper would be shot like a dog. After some parley, they slunk away, vowing vengeance."

The story runs on for a column or more, and ends with further discomfiture for the police. Then one reads:--

"In an hour from the first issue of the summons Liberty Hall was garrisoned by a hundred and fifty determined armed men, and more were trooping in every few minutes. It was splendid to see the enthusiasm of the men, and when in the course of the evening all the Women's Ambulance Corps trooped in, closely followed by the Boy Scouts, excitement and longing for battle was running high in all our veins. The Irish Volunteers were also on the alert, and stood, we are informed, until after 2 a.m. on Sat.u.r.day morning. Since then the hall has been guarded day and night."

The paper then goes on to speak of how "the heroic fighting at Suvla Bay, and even the valorous defence of Verdun, fades into insignificance side by side in Dublin by the Citizen Army, and describes how Liberty Hall is being guarded by day and by night," and then goes on to point out the danger which such open disregard of authority may lead to eventually.

Then follow two significant quotations, one from the _Irish Volunteer_ and the other from _The Spark_. The latter is an open boast of the efficacy of arms, and runs:--

"A few thousand Irishmen, who took the precaution or providing themselves with lethal weapons of one kind or another, have, without contesting a const.i.tuency and without sending a man to Westminster, compelled the Westminster Parliament to admit publicly that it dared not pa.s.s any legislation which they, the armed men, did not choose to permit."

Eoin MacNeill's threat is hardly less significant:--

"If our arms are demanded from us, we shall refuse to surrender them.

If force is used to take them from us, we shall make the most effective resistance in our power. Let there be no mistake or misunderstanding on that point.... We shall defend our arms with our lives."

Now, whatever may be thought of such sentiments, there can be no doubt whence they originated, for they are sheer Carsonism through and through; and it was, as I have repeatedly pointed out, a pure stroke of luck that it was not Belfast's City Hall instead of Dublin's Post Office that was burnt to the ground.

This physical force element, therefore, the Sinn Feiners and Larkinites had in common with the Redmondites and Ulstermen: the fact that they actually were the first to put the principle into operation is no difference at all.

In other words, we have to go deeper for a specific distinction, and that distinction is to be found in the very nature of the parties themselves who combined to form the provisional Republic.

They were two movements which had grown up outside the two Parliamentary parties and which refused to believe in Parliamentarianism as much for the simple reason that their respective watchwords had become more or less worn-out tags, out of touch with the realities of modern Irish problems, as because their leaders had, unable to a.s.similate them, taken up an att.i.tude of almost personal antipathy to them and their ideals.

It is certainly a most remarkable thing how John Redmond has lost the old Parnellite grip upon the younger life of the country, and it seems hardly credible that such an att.i.tude should be due entirely to the perversity of youth and in no way to the natural consequence of tradition-loving age; but in any case the broad fact remains, and a tone of persistent criticism seems to have taken the place of the meek obedience of other days; and newspapers, dramas, novels, criticism, and movements on all sides bear witness to it. The same, too, applies to Sir Edward Carson, whose party has to recruit in England, witness Sir F. E.

Smith.

According to Mr. T. M. Healy, the whole movement was due almost entirely to the "bankruptcy of Redmondism." No doubt the justice of the accusation may be questioned, though I hold no brief for any relative, but there can be no doubt that it was the Sinn Fein att.i.tude, and we want to see the Sinn Feiners as they saw themselves and as they saw Redmond.

The Government trusted to Redmond almost entirely, but, as Mr. Healy continues, they forgot that--

"New crystallizations were taking place. The jobbery of the official party disgusted all earnest and unselfish minds amongst the youth of Ireland. The forces of Larkinism were embittered; and the acceptance of salaries by Irish members, after their formal declaration that they would not accept them, sank deeply into the hearts of extremists.